


Saint Anthony

by Melime



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Crack, Cultural Differences, Fluff, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 22:21:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7193183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Woolsey won't tolerate layoffs, all the Brazilians have misleading surnames, Rodney confuses Brazil and Portugal and freaks out about marriage, and John doesn't want to have this talk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saint Anthony

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Português brasileiro available: [Santo Antônio](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7193186) by [Melime GreenLeaf (Melime)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime%20GreenLeaf)



> Sequel to [When lacking a Valentine](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6016228), I should have posted yesterday (June 12) because that's the Brazilian equivalent to Valentine's Day, but things happened so let's pretend I'm not posting a day late.

Rodney was in a terrible mood, and being called to Woolsey’s office only made things worse. He was a very serious scientist that had important things to do, and he couldn’t waste his time with Woolsey. The same way he couldn’t waste his time with this ridiculous Brazilian holiday, which was why he took care of the problem by firing all the Brazilian members of the expedition for the second time. He figured Woolsey would overturn him on that, but he hoped that by firing them late at night on June 11 they would stay fired for long enough so the holiday was canceled. Now, as he entered Woolsey’s office to find the man himself, along with three very angry people that he never bothered to learn the names of, and John, the last person he wanted to see on that day.

“What are you doing here?” Rodney asked John, because he shouldn’t be there, there was absolutely no reason for him to be there.

John raised an eyebrow and leaned back on his chair. “I was called here because someone decided to try to eliminate a country from the expedition, _again_.”

“How do you know I didn’t have a legitimate reason to fire them?” he asked John, ignoring Woolsey that was trying to get his attention.

“Do you even know their names?”

“Oh, that’s a low blow and you know it. I don’t know anyone’s name!”

“Their jobs then.”

Rodney frowned, he was almost sure he knew the answer to that. “The women aren’t even scientists, they are part of one of those useless departments I keep insisting we should terminate, and the misleadingly Japanese looking guy is a chemist.”

The three scientists spoke nearly at the same time.

“Well, I’m also Japanese. I just choose to alternate the flag I wear.”

“Paleontology isn’t useless! We just made a discovery that could help explain convergent evolution in different galaxies.”

“You do realize that I saved your team from execution twice and annulled around ten of your accidental marriages to natives and members of your team, that’s hardly useless. If anything the legal department should be expanded.”

Rodney suddenly remembered that he and John weren’t alone. “Right. You all made excellent points so I’m reverting my decision, you are all reinstated effective tomorrow. Now if that’s it I have to get back to work.”

Rodney nearly ran away, before anyone else had a chance to question his motives. Unfortunately for him, not so fast that John couldn’t catch up with him.

“Hey, Rodney, what’s going on?”

“What do you mean what’s going on? Nothing is ‘going on’,” he said doing air quotes without stopping or looking back to John.

“Yeah, right.” John grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him to a nearby empty office. “Can you please explain to me why you are so eager to cancel Valentine’s Day number three that you fired Schäfer, Rossi and Ishida?”

“Why do all of them have such misleading names?”

“Rodney…”

“Seriously, how am I supposed to tell where they are from?”

John patted the flag on his arm, reminding Rodney of how absurd he sounded. “Now can we actually talk?”

Rodney knew he was screwed if John wanted to talk. “I don’t want this Valentine’s Day to happen.”

John rolled his eyes. “Yes, that much is obvious. What’s wrong with this one? You seemed to enjoy the last one, and we had a lot of fun in the first one.”

Rodney blushed slightly remembering what the ‘a lot of fun’ was. True, Valentine’s Day number one was probably the best he ever had, and number two involved some chocolate, which was also nice. However, number three was another matter entirely.

“I overheard one of the Brazilians talking about the holiday, and I think we got things wrong.”

“They do have names, you know? I just told you. And what did we get wrong?”

“Right, right. Which one is the lawyer?”

“Schäfer.”

“Seriously? She doesn’t look German at all.”

“Rodney, what did we get wrong?”

Rodney didn’t want to have this conversation, which was what made him try to fire people in the first place. “Apparently, there’s a Saint Anthony whose day is tomorrow, and that’s why they picked this date.”

“So you are weirded out because it’s a religious holiday? I have some news to you about Saint Valentine.”

Rodney shook his head. “No, the problem is what he’s a saint of. He’s the saint of marriage! She was talking about how they have this ridiculous ritual where they take a statue of him and put him upside down in water to get married!”

“Wait, are you saying today is about people who are dating getting married?”

If any of the two knew anything about Brazil, they would have known that Rodney seriously misinterpreted what Schäfer said, and that although the saint was indeed associated with marriage and the ritual was right, June 12 was not that much different from February 14. In fact, if Rodney hadn’t panicked when he heard the word ‘marriage’, he might have noticed that Schäfer was flirting Moreira, a Portuguese physicist, and that this somehow became a conversation about their cultural differences. Had that happened, he would have realized that the marriage fest was on June 13 and that he was firing people from the wrong country.

“Exactly! So you see why I had to sabotage this, it was just another chance for me to ruin everything.”

John rubbed his eyes, this wasn’t where he was expecting this conversation to go when Woolsey called him. “We are not getting married,” he said, because he felt that this had to be clear. Especially because they did get married to each other quite a few times, but those didn’t count. It wasn’t as if he didn’t l… care about Rodney, he did, but he didn’t even see himself as the marrying type the first time around, and that turned out to be a disaster.

“Oh, I know that. I mean, other than the fact that you would be sent back to Earth and court martialed, although you know that should change soon enough, and that this isn’t even legally recognized in most places, although that too is changing, there’s the fact that marriages are horrible and make people hate each other. Plus, it’s not even been four months, who would propose after that little time?” Rodney knew he was rambling, but he hadn’t expected John to take things like that and he now feared he had managed to ruin everything.

John wanted to point out that they had actually been close for a long time before those four months, although he wasn’t entirely sure that time spent dating someone else should count, and that that was a very cynical view of marriage, but neither of those things would help his point, so he didn’t. “Right. So can we agree to ignore the whole marriage thing and pretend this is a repeat of Valentine’s Day? You know, now that I have a proper large bed that you like and all that.”

What Rodney hadn’t been counting on and was his lifeline was that John was even worse at this sort of thing than he was, and was glad to offer them both an out. “That depends, would that get you on skinny jeans again?”


End file.
